The Social Programmer Robert DeLine Microsoft Research University of Washington, 6 Oct 2009

thinkgeek.com

People and their Roles customers pm test dev spec

pm test dev spec customers People and their Roles

pm test dev spec People and their Roles

pm test dev spec People and their Roles

Ko, DeLine, and Venolia, ICSE 2007 code submit bug triage bug repro understanding design awareness non-work (—)

Developer Information Needs

Developers are thread schedulers! void BeDeveloper() { while ( ! quittingTime) { try { var task = readyTasks.PickOne(); while ( ! (task.IsDone || task.IsBlocked)) { task.MakeProgress(); } if (task.IsBlocked) { readyTasks.Remove(task); blockedTasks.Add(task); } catch (Interruption interruption) { var info = interruption.FreshInformation; if (info != null) { foreach (var task in blockedTasks) { if (task.BlockedOnInformationNeed(info)) { blockedTasks.Remove(task); readyTasks.Add(task); }

Links from Source schema Structured documents Plain-text allusions Computed relationships Logging user behavior – etc. Graph gives basis for – Link-analysis scoring – Diary of an artifact – Recommendations – etc. etc. Product Studio Share Point Source Depot Making the most of existing data From: Joe Coder To: Project XYZ Dev Team Subject: Re: account bug I managed to repro bug #3242 on my machine last night. I think it might have to do with the Account.Add method that got changed in the last push. I’ll take a look. From: Joe Coder To: Project XYZ Dev Team Subject: Re: account bug I managed to repro bug #3242 on my machine last night. I think it might have to do with the Account.Add method that got changed in the last push. I’ll take a look. Venolia, MSR 06 The Bridge

Social networking for development teams FacebookCodebook Begel and DeLine, MSR 06

Engineers need help finding people Survey to rate difficulty of coordination tasks – 110 respondents out of 1000 engineers (PMs, SDEs, SDETs) – 31 tasks in 8 categories, from prior interviews In our survey to Microsoft engineers: – 83% want a better tool to find engineers responsible for a feature. – 67% want a better tool to find knowledgeable experts about features. – 64% want a better tool to find relevant code, specs, bugs, etc., belonging to another team. (Begel, Phang, and Zimmerman, in submission to ICSE 10)

Scenario: Bug in an external library Xin found a bug in his code, probably caused by an external library that was just updated. He looked on Bing but didn’t find anything. – Of course not, it’s not released yet! Is he using this library correctly? – Can he find someone to look at his code and tell him what’s wrong? Has someone already filed a bug against this? He thinks this a bug in their design, who owns the specs?

With Codebook Go to Codebook PortalGo to Codebook Portal …… Go to Codebook PortalGo to Codebook Portal ……

The problem is in the StoreSync() method in the Pegasus project, so Xin enters “pegasus StoreSync”

Xin gets all people, work items, code, and files which are related to “pegasus StoreSync”. (Names and photos have been anonymized)

Aha! This is the method, and that’s the SDE who wrote it.

Perhaps this SDE can look at his code.

Savant is the SDE, and his contact info is listed.

Savant is also highlighted in other results

There doesn’t seem to be specs or bugs, but Savant works with this crew.

Xin can contact the PM to get the spec or file a bug

Now that he has found the SDE and the PM, he can fix his code!

Challenge: Most frustrating needs What code caused this program state? 61% unsatisfied, max 21 min Why was the code implemented this way? 44%, 21 min In what situations does this failure occur? 41%, 49 min What code could have caused this behavior? 36%, 17 min How have the resources I depend on changed? 24%, 9 min What is the program supposed to do? 15%, 21 min What have my coworkers been doing? 14%, 11 min

Potential future tools What code caused this program state? 61% unsatisfied, max 21 min Why was the code implemented this way? 44%, 21 min In what situations does this failure occur? 41%, 49 min What code could have caused this behavior? 36%, 17 min How have the resources I depend on changed? 24%, 9 min What is the program supposed to do? 15%, 21 min What have my coworkers been doing? 14%, 11 min program analysisawareness toolsmodel-base eng. research.microsoft.com/hip